Fig. 3

Phylogenetic analysis by Maximum Likelihood method. The evolutionary history of Borrelia spp. isolates, based on the 16S-23S IGS, was inferred by using the Maximum Likelihood method based on the Tamura 3-parameter model [33]. Initial tree(s) for the heuristic search were obtained automatically by applying Neighbor-Join and BioNJ algorithms to a matrix of pairwise distances estimated using the Maximum Composite Likelihood (MCL) approach, and then selecting the topology with superior log likelihood value. The tree is drawn to scale, with branch lengths measured in the number of substitutions per site. The analysis involved 39 nucleotide sequences. All positions containing gaps and missing data were eliminated. There were a total of 72 positions in the final dataset. Evolutionary analyses were conducted in MEGA7 [34]